CIA’s Early Cold War REDSOX Foreign Intelligence Operations into Ukraine, Part One ©

 In January 1950, the United States National Security Council (NSC) issued Intelligence Directive No. 13 entitled  "Exploitation of Soviet and Satellite Defectors Outside the United States." This directive specifically defined defectors as, 

 

"Individuals who escape from the control of the USSR or countries in the Soviet orbit, or who, being outside such jurisdiction or control, are unwilling to return to it, and who are of special interest to the U.S. Government because they can add valuable new or confirmatory information to existing U.S. knowledge of the Soviet world because their defection can be exploited in the psychological field."

 

NSC authorized and directed that "The Central Intelligence Agency shall be responsible for the covert exploitation of defectors, and shall coordinate all matters concerned with the handling and disposition of declared defectors from the Soviet Union and the satellite states to assure the effective exploitation of all defectors for operational, intelligence, or psychological purposes by the U.S. Government." 

 

REDSOX was a CIA cryptonym for Foreign Intelligence operations in the early Cold War involving “The illegal return of defectors and emigres to USSR as agents.” The information below comes from declassified CIA documents.

 

CIA's REDSOX operational plan for Spring 1952.

 

“Both the undersigned case officers and the ZP/UHVR themselves strongly agree that granted the extent of Soviet knowledge of CIA and British Intelligence dispatches of the past several years, any possibility of a May-moon-period air dispatch into Western Ukraine catching the Soviets napping must be discarded as wishful thinking; the trick has been tried too often. 

 

“Or the other hand, so long as quantities of snow are on the ground, the Soviets do not expect the woodland partisan activity of any sort, much less an airdrop of partisan couriers, who, as the Soviets well know, would have to wait for local contact until their local colleagues come out of their bunkers in late April. Therefore, it is strongly recommended by both the agents and the case officers that one of the last ten nights of March or the first five of April be utilized to dispatch the next ZP/UHVR team. March has never been used for an air mission to the Soviet Union. The next ZP/UHVR team members are frankly scared of waiting until the usual time in May. 

 

“From their point of view, a month of camping in the snow of an isolated mountain forest is far less dangerous than dropping in during the warmer weather when Soviets are out in force for the now-traditional spring anti-partisan campaign. 

 

“From our point of view, the plane and crew should by all odds be safer flying in and out in late March than would be the case in mid or late spring. Suppose the operation can be handled securely from this end. In that case, the change of schedule to March plus the use of a slightly different air approach should cancel out the effectiveness of Soviet-made plans for intercepting an aircraft or observing parachutists while they are landing. While the case officers are not air experts, they have given a lot of thought to the ground reactions to the CIA and British Intelligence Service flights of 1950 and 1951. 

 

“We know that by January 1950, the Soviets were aware that the U.S. was dropping personnel by air into Western Ukraine, but the Soviets were apparently unable to do anything to thwart the May 1950 mission. By early July 1950, the Soviets had captured alive one of the four men who had jumped in two months earlier. By Mid-August 1950, the Russian Intelligence Service can be assumed to have known all the essential facts concerning the September 1949 and May 1950 drops.

 

“Despite this, three separate air flights safely deposited a total of 22 agents in Western Ukraine in May 1951. The flights themselves were decidedly a success. Even though they repeated the pattern established the previous year, there was nothing except the flares our plane saw at the border to show that the Soviets had devised any methods for coping with the flights. 

 

"We have no information to indicate that the demise of the two British teams and the breakdown of communications with our team had a direct connection with the fact that the teams arrived in Western Ukraine by air. In brief, as far as Western Ukraine is concerned, we are not impressed with the Soviets' ability to thwart even those air operations that logic would lead them to anticipate.“